Original URL: https://www.adlerplanetarium.org/blog/adler-astronomers-to-develop-ai-tools-for-astronomy/
By Adler Planetarium, December 19, 2024
It’s a strange moment for artificial intelligence. The general public is slowly becoming aware that the same technology that scans faces in large-scale surveillance operations can also mimic famous voices, produce terrible college essays, drive a car (sort of), and generate inedible pizza recipes. Meanwhile, AI backers are telling us that someday, this very same technology may help cure deadly diseases, but it might also take your job and/or destroy the world.
So, where do we go from here?
Nobody knows what AI systems will and won’t be capable of 20 years from now. But thanks to a $20-million grant from the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation, scientists from the Adler Planetarium will help shape the technology’s future and untangle the ethical questions that arise from harnessing its power for astronomy research.
The five-year grant will establish the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI Institute)—a consortium of 83 team members from the Adler, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, FermiLab, Argonne National Laboratory, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and the Toyota Technological Institute. To read more, see https://www.adlerplanetarium.org/blog/adler-astronomers-to-develop-ai-tools-for-astronomy/
The SkAI Institute is one of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes funded by the US National Science Foundation and Simons Foundation.
Information on National AI Institutes is available at aiinstitutes.org.
